We notice that the same old, uncomfortable issues have been sitting at the bottom of our Level 10 Meeting Issues List for months because we always focus on the fresh issues added that week. How do we prevent this operational procrastination and force ourselves to tackle these lingering issues?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Allowing legacy issues to sit at the bottom of your weekly Issues List while you constantly tackle fresh, easy issues is a common trap. This behavior is a form of operational procrastination. The team avoids the older issues because they are uncomfortable, politically sensitive, or complex, choosing instead to focus on the immediate, less impactful fires of the week.

To break this habit, you must strictly follow the prioritization step of the IDS® process. At the beginning of the IDS® portion, do not start at the top of the list. Instead, the facilitator must ask the team to look at the entire list and collectively identify the three most important issues to solve today.

If a legacy issue has been on the list for more than three weeks, the facilitator should explicitly ask the team why it is being ignored. Is it because the root cause is too painful to address? Or is it because the issue does not have a clear owner on the Accountability Chart?

Force the team to make that lingering issue number one or number two on the priority list for that day. Do not allow the team to move on to easy, transactional issues until the hard, systemic issues are solved. Tackling your most uncomfortable bottlenecks head-on is the only way to build real operational traction.